Category: Film

A new HBO film shows how Jerry Sandusky revealed flaws in Joe Paterno that no one, least of all the coach himself, knew were thereJoe Paterno coached football at Pennsylvania State University for 62 years, 46 of them as head coach, winning 409 games (a…

Nearly 50 years after a group of black Wyoming football players were kicked off the team for even contemplating a protest, a new documentary gives their courage an overdue spotlightBefore there was Colin Kaepernick, there were the Black 14.It was the f…

James Franco was missing from the Oscars ceremony after allegations of sexual misconduct. So why did a basketball star accused of rape win plaudits?A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of participating in a Time’s Up discussion with women from var…

Former NBA star wins Academy award for short he wrote and narrated, despite controversy over historic sexual assault allegationFormer NBA star Kobe Bryant has become an unlikely Oscar winner after Dear Basketball, which he wrote and narrated, won the A…

The New England Patriots tight end has hinted he may consider retiring at the age of 28 – and there are plenty of reasons for swapping the NFL for HolywoodFollowing his team’s Super Bowl loss this month, New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski hi…

Live updates on the non-sporting action from the Super Bowl 2018, including the half-time show, biggest commercials and film trailersFollow the game: live updates on the Super Bowl 1.08am GMT Timberlake is teasing his arrival. That outfit does not look…

The film strips away the rhinestones and makeup but wants to leave us wondering about the real victim of the attack on figure skater Kerrigan in January 1994As we were reminded by the events in the Michigan courtroom over which Judge Rosemarie Aquilina…

The British Olympian and pioneering gay athlete is to shine again in The Ice King, a documentary telling his storyJohn Curry’s graceful path to Winter Olympic triumph for Britain in 1976 – and to a place in the hearts of his fans – really began when hi…

Martin Foyston’s course in film studies helped him secure a job at Fulham, where he met Roy Hodgson and was inspired to take a risk and become a coachBy Tom Harvey for The Set Pieces, part of the Guardian Sport NetworkMartin Foyston walked away from a …

Billie-Jean King’s match against the 1939 men’s Wimbledon champion in 1973 provides the main thrust of a new film but like other sporting movies the facts are often massaged to augment the storyAfter the credits finished rolling at the end of the Battl…

Fans mock commercial tie-up that chief executive David Gallop hails a way to ‘expand the football family’In the midst of a governance crisis, Football Federation Australia has announced it has teamed up with Walt Disney for a Star Wars round, to kick o…

The tennis champion’s lifelong fight for equality and freedom is celebrated in a new film about the Battle of the Sexes. She talks about not being comfortable in her own skin until she was 51, and why millennials give her hopeIn 1955, when she was 12 y…

Kim Chambers started swimming after a life-changing accident. Just a few years later, she became the first woman to take on a notorious stretch of shark-inhabited waters Under a black sky in August 2015, Kim Chambers boarded a boat and headed out benea…

Terry Downes, the “Dashing, Crashing, Bashing Paddington Express” who has died aged 81, was a popular all-action fighter who became world middleweight champion for nine months in 1961-62, retiring aged only 28 in 1964, when he was beaten in a challenge for the world light heavyweight title. A headline writer’s dream with a sharp cockney wit that spawned numerous one-liners, he was beloved by boxing promoters. His aggressive style rarely produced a dull fight, and Downes also had the charisma to ensure he was a major box-office draw.

Born and brought up in London, where he boxed as a junior for the Fisher amateur boxing club, Downes completed his boxing education in the US, where he fought for the Marine corps, which he had joined after his family emigrated in 1952. Downes’s elder sister, Sylvia, had previously travelled to Baltimore to join the famed Ringling Bros circus, but her family moved to the US to be with her when she lost an arm in a road accident. She was thrown from a bus on the way to the circus, suffering injuries when she was trapped between the vehicle and a telegraph pole.

The fine details of his brief reign as world middleweight champion are not always absorbed in recollections of his career, mainly because one of the greatest films of all time painted him in classically Shakespearean mode

Jake LaMotta should have been in Las Vegas to watch Gennady Golovkin and Saul “Canelo” Álvarez, two distinguished middleweights pitched together to echo the deeds of the division’s glorious past, a fight reckoned to restore boxing’s faltering image. LaMotta, who knew a lot about the game’s sullied reputation, would have given it a wry smile.

The fight did not quite do its job. It was a terrific rather than a truly great contest and dreadful misjudgment by one of the officials overwhelmingly in favour of Álvarez returned a split draw, drowning out all other post-fight sentiments. So, unfairly but inevitably, Golovkin-Álvarez will be remembered only slightly more fondly than the theatrical crossover fight in the same ring three weeks earlier between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor.

Police officers and their pay | James Bond and the former Fifa president | Going tabloid in the 19th century | Borrowings by Robert Louis Stevenson and Bob Dylan | From Trump Street into Russia Row

Your editorial on public sector pay (Nurses teachers and firefighters are long overdue a rise, 20 June) was disappointing for a couple of reasons. First, you exclude police officers from the headline, when they have suffered similar pay freezes and cuts, compounded by pay-scale freezes and the largest raid on pensions. Second, you use the sexist term “policemen” when referring to officers running into danger – are you suggesting policewomen run the other way? The perfectly respectable gender-neutral alternatives “officer” and “constable” have been in satisfactory use for many decades. DCI Louise FleckneyBroughton, Northamptonshire

Justin Fashanu, the first openly gay footballer, killed himself with his life mired in chaos and injury. As documentary Forbidden Games casts light on his tragic story, his sibling talks about their troubled relationship

The story of Justin Fashanu – the world’s first £1m black footballer and Britain’s first openly gay footballer, who killed himself aged 37 in 1998 – makes a moving, challenging, troubling biopic. Forbidden Games tells how Justin and his brother John, aged four and three, were removed from their mother and three siblings, to be fostered by Barnardo’s. The more sensitive Justin could never reconcile what he perceived to be an abandonment, but John saw things differently. “No mother wants to give away her own children,” he says, “and it propelled us to become major celebrities all over the world. We made ourselves millionaires, so it couldn’t have been all that bad, could it?”

John’s resulting insecurity manifested itself in shyness and a speech impediment. He clung to Justin, “the only person who could hear what I was talking about … that was part of the bonding of us at a young age”.

Justin Fashanu, the first openly gay footballer, killed himself with his life mired in chaos and injury. As documentary Forbidden Games casts light on his tragic story, his sibling talks about their troubled relationship

The story of Justin Fashanu – the world’s first £1m black footballer and Britain’s first openly gay footballer, who killed himself aged 37 in 1998 – makes a moving, challenging, troubling biopic. Forbidden Games tells how Justin and his brother John, aged four and three, were removed from their mother and three siblings, to be fostered by Barnardo’s. The more sensitive Justin could never reconcile what he perceived to be an abandonment, but John saw things differently. “No mother wants to give away her own children,” he says, “and it propelled us to become major celebrities all over the world. We made ourselves millionaires, so it couldn’t have been all that bad, could it?”

John’s resulting insecurity manifested itself in shyness and a speech impediment. He clung to Justin, “the only person who could hear what I was talking about … that was part of the bonding of us at a young age”.

Film tells how Bert Trautmann, who played in Cup final with broken neck, overcame Nazi pastAs a piece of fiction, a film about a former Nazi paratrooper who becomes a hero of English football might struggle to convince audiences. But the true story of …